mRbhttp://mtlreviewofbooks.ca
Montreal Review of BooksThu, 14 Sep 2017 10:05:32 +0000en-CAhourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.8.234066144Red, Yellow, Greenhttp://mtlreviewofbooks.ca/reviews/red-yellow-green/
http://mtlreviewofbooks.ca/reviews/red-yellow-green/#respondThu, 14 Sep 2017 10:05:32 +0000http://mtlreviewofbooks.ca/?post_type=mrb_review&p=11750Alfredo Cutipa, the protagonist in Alejandro Saravia’s novel Red, Yellow, Green, is a Bolivian in his thirties residing in Montreal. Burdened by the past, he now haunts the city, its streets, metro, cafés, and bars. His entanglements, including a love affair with a Kurdish freedom-fighter named, of all things, Bolivia, collide with his memories to set off consecutive detonations in a labyrinthine narrative that lodges like shrapnel – bracing and painful. Trigger warning: inasmuch as the novel exposes the violence Alfredo witnessed in Bolivia, this is a violent book. It is also playfully absurdist, funny, brilliant, and courageous. You may need to muster an iota of the author’s courage to read the novel, but you will be rewarded.

“Who cares?” Alfredo asks, over and over again, as he wanders Montreal seeking connection and validation. Riding the metro, Alfredo searches for someone to understand his “stubborn muttering” and goes so far, in a “silent act of protest,” as to wear “socks with the colours of the Bolivian flag: red, yellow and green.” In his exterior world of the early nineties, he is both attracted to and perplexed by the complexities of a city inhabited by all manner of ethnicities and languages, a city fraught and occasionally beautiful, as when “the snow turned Montreal into a vast white page in which all stories were possible.”

Red, Yellow, GreenAlejandro SaraviaTranslated by María José Giménez

Biblioasis$19.95paper200pp9781771961417

For Alfredo, being Bolivian means having “a wound that never heals.” In his interior world, Alfredo is stuck in Bolivia, struggling to process the horrific violence he witnessed and was subjected to, and make sense of his country’s complicated history. These memories, delivered as flashbacks deftly woven into the scenes occurring in Montreal, centre around 1980, a time of chaos and brutality culminating in a vicious coup carried out by General Luis García Meza (one of many Bolivian ex-dictators inhabiting the novel), in which Alfredo himself, as a young recruit, played a part. An incident in particular obsesses him: the gruesome abuse of a soldier named Boxeador, in some ways the true hero of this novel, by the army officers in the barracks.

“Why didn’t I do something?” Herein lies the crux of Alfredo’s suffering: not only is he beaten by the officers, he is also witness to their atrocities and does nothing. Shamed by both survival guilt and the guilt of being a collaborator, Alfredo’s struggle boils down to this: to choose between history and oblivion. And his only path forward is to write it all down. “Who the hell cares about this story at all? No one. Absolutely no one. And yet, Alfredo felt he had to write it down…Our memory belongs to everyone, to those who died and those who live with buried memories.”

From the beginning of the novel, the struggle to write, to find the words and purpose, drives the narrative. Alfredo emerges from his bouts of writing to dialogue with characters such as Scribe, another self with whom to debate the futility or validity of his endeavour. The author’s approach, ironically meta, allows the narrative to shift between points of view so that what could have been tedious stream of consciousness becomes elastic, along with time and geography, as the story shifts between Alfredo’s present and past, between settings in Montreal, Bolivia, and elsewhere.

The book’s structure stretches the boundaries of novelistic form. Delivered in two sections of segmented prose, there are no chapters, just short breaks to separate the scenes. The language of the novel is faithful to its subject, Alfredo’s inner workings, simulating the convoluted, associative, and fragmented nature of the human mind and memory. Some segments read like prose poems – circular, compressed, often imagistic, and even lyrical – no surprise given that Alejandro Saravia is also the author of eight volumes of poetry.

The formal audacity of Red, Yellow, Green positions Saravia, born in Cochabamba, Bolivia and based in Montreal, among the best contemporary writers. Thanks to the Biblioasis International Translation Series, this novel, originally written in Spanish and published in 2003, can now reach a wider audience in an excellent translation by María José Giménez.

“Who cares?” Alfredo asks repeatedly. Saravia’s accomplishment in Red, Yellow, Green is to make you care, and deeply.mRb

Bouchet’s protagonist, twelve-year-old Souleye, has just immigrated to Montreal from Senegal with his family. When they arrive, they’re filled with hope and enthusiasm and want nothing more than to adapt to their new home, to look straight ahead “without turning back.” But Canada is not the Promised Land they imagined. Quiet and sensitive, Souleye watches his parents struggle to find work and an apartment as black immigrants in a predominantly white neighbourhood. He sees his older brother, Bibi, adjust effortlessly, while he fails to be understood by anyone except his lonely neighbour, Charlotte. He sees his family lose their most prized possession, a hard drive filled with memories from Senegal. And as the seasons pass, he sees his father slowly begin to unravel.

Sun of a Distant LandDavid BouchetTranslated by Claire Holden Rothman

Esplanade Book$19.95paper240pp9781550654639

Throughout the novel, Souleye’s empathetic way of seeing the world guides us forward. “In Senegal, we say that when two gazes meet, tongues fall silent and let the eyes speak.” For Souleye, silence is a way of communicating with those he loves most, to understand and be understood by others: “We can spend a long time without saying a word, Charlotte and I, without looking at each other, just being there side by side, not noticing time passing.” When Souleye’s father is hospitalized and stops speaking, their relationship becomes one of listening and silent understanding.

Language and communication are central themes in Bouchet’s novel, and this leads to interesting challenges in translation. In Soleil, the French is interspersed with Senegalese phrases, Quebec words, and English expressions. His novel is rife with wordplay and clever turns of phrases, the most obvious being Charlotte’s misunderstanding of Souleye’s name as “Soleil.” In translation, these moments might easily have been lost. Rothman does an admirable job of capturing Bouchet’s layering of languages through various techniques: by adding context or explanations, leaving words in French, and italicizing English words to highlight their importance, among others. While there are some awkward lines and sentences that don’t quite roll off the tongue, Rothman manages to convey the linguistic complexity of the original work, which is so central to Souleye’s experience as a foreigner and minority.

While racism and discrimination in Quebec are touched upon in the novel, Bouchet’s story is never black and white. As Souleye’s family attempts to put down roots, they experience a complicated mixture of isolation, prejudice, and genuine human warmth. In Petite-Nation, they are exoticized and othered, but also welcomed and admired. Souleye’s life is continuously compared to Charlotte’s, whose troubled home contrasts starkly with Souleye’s warm and loving family. Bouchet’s world is filled with contradictions, and this is one of the major strengths of the novel. The borders between languages, cultures, and identities are easily blurred, and we are left with people in all their marvellous complexities.mRb

]]>http://mtlreviewofbooks.ca/reviews/sun-of-a-distant-land/feed/011734Getting Out of Hopehttp://mtlreviewofbooks.ca/reviews/getting-out-of-hope/
http://mtlreviewofbooks.ca/reviews/getting-out-of-hope/#respondThu, 17 Aug 2017 10:37:10 +0000http://mtlreviewofbooks.ca/?post_type=mrb_review&p=11721Getting Out of Hope, James Cadelli’s debut graphic novel, opens with a literal cliffhanger: Justin and his two friends, a trio of hippie dudes from “Halifax-ish,” are road-tripping across the country in a creaky RV, having pledged to “do anything and everything that’s fun, funny and dumb.” Justin’s friends are stoked to jump off an intimidating cliff into the lake below – but Justin, a more sensitive type, demurs. He leaves them to their uncertain fate and drives into town to get some food.

What, from this introduction, threatens to be a run-of-the-mill comic about some party bros getting lost in small-town BC, fortunately expands into a more refreshing narrative, thanks to the addition of an assortment of characters: the inhabitants of Hope. Justin pulls into this community just as the RV dies on him and is rescued and given lodging by Marie, a Montreal transplant cursing her dead-end job as a building manager.

Marie is immediately sympathetic in a way that opens up the story. She’s gruff, but can’t help being kind to others, despite the headaches they give her. Her kitchen is covered in Post-its that give a sense of her days hassling tenants for overdue rent, fixing household appliances, and cleaning puke off the front steps. One wistful note, near the bottom of the fridge reads: “TRAVEL? LOL.”

Getting Out of HopeJames Cadelli

Conundrum Press$18.00paper208pp9781772620146

Marie’s tenants are introduced in due course. Jojo, an elderly lady, is alone with her chronic pain, baking and writing letters to her dead husband. She lives below Tom, a sullen drug dealer. At first, Jojo and Tom are predictable adversaries: Tom plays loud music and Jojo bangs on the ceiling with a broom handle. However, when Jojo asks him to sell her some painkillers, their relationship takes a turn. They wind up getting stoned together and baking a cake. It’s very nearly a Martha Stewart/Snoop Dogg moment. Minor characters who roam the building include a world-weary child who goes door-to-door collecting cans; Jean-Sam, who has a morbid photography obsession; and Cass, Marie’s freewheeling friend.

Cadelli proves to be a generous storyteller. He gives his characters room to grow, and shows a decidedly non-judgmental approach to drug use, whether it’s for fun, relaxation, or pain relief. Getting high together often compels characters to bond when they otherwise would not have. There are occasional flat notes, like a joke Marie makes about being “pretty sure [she] has AIDS now” after touching a used needle, but generally, Cadelli is able to strike a balance between strife and silliness. The town of Hope is effectively isolated, and one gets the sense that its denizens are stuck there. “What’s out there? Beyond them mountains?” Tom asks Jojo as they smoke together, staring out the window, and she responds, “To be honest, I forget…” Soon, Jojo will ask Tom for a far heavier favour than sharing his stash. While Tom and Jojo provide a darker side to the narrative, the other characters liven it up; ultimately everyone helps each other to move on and out.

The drawing style in Getting Out of Hope is simple, sometimes grazing the edge of underdeveloped, but as the story builds to a climax, the images do as well. There are some nicely cinematic moments near the end. When Cadelli lets himself have fun with some full-page scenes, it pays off. Getting Out of Hope is a romp, at once lighthearted and unexpectedly serious, and a solid debut.mRb

My paychecks all go to heirloom parsnips and pickled lamb tongues.
I dream of singed pigs’ feet, pearly cartilage and crisp skin.]]>I would cut off my own thumb for the perfect thimbleful
of wood-ear mushroom and bamboo shoot soup.

]]>11709But When We Look Closerhttp://mtlreviewofbooks.ca/reviews/but-when-we-look-closer/
http://mtlreviewofbooks.ca/reviews/but-when-we-look-closer/#respondThu, 27 Jul 2017 10:36:20 +0000http://mtlreviewofbooks.ca/?post_type=mrb_review&p=11698But When We Look Closer, her debut collection of eighteen short stories, Susan E. Lloy establishes a literary version of film noir, presenting us with characters whose suffering comes in many forms. In prose that fluctuates between stark and densely cinematic, Lloy explores the inner lives of the lost, the lonely, and the mentally ill.]]>In But When We Look Closer, her debut collection of eighteen short stories, Susan E. Lloy establishes a literary version of film noir, presenting us with characters whose suffering comes in many forms. In prose that fluctuates between stark and densely cinematic, Lloy explores the inner lives of the lost, the lonely, and the mentally ill. The majority of her narrators are women, but these are women as predators, as ambivalent mothers, as desperate junkies counting the minutes until their next fix.

The dark tone of the collection is set with the title story. Exhausted by their constant demands, single mother Gwendolyn sends her children out to play in a nor’easter with “hurricane-force winds and record amounts of snow.” The storm intensifies and the tension mounts as Gwendolyn spends the day drinking wine and brooding about her youthful dreams of “getting out of this place.” The vagaries of life have trapped her in Nova Scotia, where “plans evaporated like late morning fog on a warm day.” Long before she thinks to call the children back into the house, we suspect the tragedy about to unfold.

But When We Look CloserSusan E. Lloy

NON Publishing$19.95paper181pp9781988098258

Their stories may be different, but many of Lloy’s characters follow the same paths in life, beginning in stifling small-town Nova Scotia, where “depression was something that came and went like the tides and bad weather” and characters gaze “into the cold, black water imagining every primal fear ready to break through the surface.” Some abandon the East coast and relocate to the big city of Montreal, with its seedy bars and its “balconies tattooed with roses.” There are also life-changing trips to Amsterdam, with its “small houses, complicated men and crowded squares full with tourists,” and post-industrial Berlin, “entrenched with attitude and edge,” where everyone “appeared to have heaps of money for fun, leisure and drugs.” Each of these four regions possesses its own centre of gravity, drawing characters back in search of how things used to be or how things should have been.

The strongest of Lloy’s stories feature complex, energetic characters who transcend easy judgment. In “Even Sad Dogs Smile,” a young painter is diagnosed with schizophrenia but believes that she must choose between her medication and her creativity, while the fate of her adopted dog hangs in the balance. The darkly playful “Escape from Reform School” explores the allure of childhood games that grow more dangerous with each passing year, and “Bad Clock” is an unapologetic paean to the pleasures and dangers of cocaine: “It was always great in the beginning hours, but then the down came. Like the great force from an ocean wave that pins you against the bottom.”

At times, Lloy’s writing loses momentum, with certain stories becoming mired in repetitive sequences of events or stilted, unrealistic dialogue. But as a whole, the collection succeeds as a haunting series of portraits of characters mourning past lovers, past selves, and the ghosts of happiness.mRb

If I could go back to my birthplace, Lanciano,
wander all day up and down the corso,
stop by the cathedral built on the ruins
of a Roman prison and pray,…………………………………if I could

make my way at night by the glimmering
of my brief candle, and if I could see
into the darkness and find my father,
if he were still living………………………there in Lanciano.

Strangely it seems it was just yesterday
that I returned from Lanciano feeling
despondent because if I were pure
spirit I could have gone back………………………………….in time too

(traversed the years along with the miles),
and so have seen my father before
the World War, seen the boy my father was
before his father betrayed………………………………a barefoot son

and sold his bicycle. If I call him
by his true name, Vincenzo, not Vincent,
will he recall then his life in Italian,
through eyes still clear,…………………………..through hopes undimmed?

If I were sharper, or indeed purer,
I might yet see that boy in the old man
in stocking feet at the nursing home
in Toronto, my father who……………………………..no longer knows

his life or his daughter in any language.
When at last he rises from his wheelchair,
when he leaves this earth to return to
earth, he too will go back……………………………..to Lanciano,

to the cathedral on the corso,
where he will find his bicycle among
the stolen years of his life, and ride it,
not towards the future, but into……………………………………the past.

]]>11675Planetary Noisehttp://mtlreviewofbooks.ca/reviews/planetary-noise/
http://mtlreviewofbooks.ca/reviews/planetary-noise/#respondFri, 07 Jul 2017 04:20:51 +0000http://mtlreviewofbooks.ca/v4/?post_type=mrb_review&p=11535Definitions have always been a way of corseting language, of tucking the ambiguities of words out of sight, and of keeping verbal intention in line. Although poetry is most commonly structured according to the line, toeing the line will never define it. Language, when used passively, is a barrier to creativity, as Erín Moure elucidates: “I stood before the screen of my own language. There was no remedy. Either I stood before the original work in its incredible beauty or I stood before the screen of my language … screen of my language that stood between me and the poem.” Moure aims to perforate that screen, to brush aside the mundane and definitive use of language, in order to access the wider gesture of its sensuality.

Openness, dissection, reconstruction, and the wringing out of language are key to the newly released Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erín Moure. Celebrating one of North America’s most prolific and groundbreaking poets – whose literary achievements span four decades of publishing, a Governor General’s Award among other prizes, sixteen collections of poetry, and an equally impressive output of collaborative texts and translations – this anthology also honours Moure’s ongoing project of embracing the fallibility of language and, by extension, of poetry itself. “When ‘my language’ fails, only then can we detect signals … as in planetary noise,” writes Moure, a passage that both provides the book’s title and insists that a word’s most obvious significance is also its least relevant.

Planetary NoiseSelected Poetry of Erin MoureEdited by Shannon Maguire

Wesleyan University PressUS$19.95paper208pp9780819576958

As a poet, Moure intentionally looks beyond meaning to what she calls “noise,” the reverberating implications of language that “interfere with a desired signal.” I was fortunate to be able to ask both Moure and the anthology’s editor, Shannon Maguire, a few questions, and each contrasted the typically negative or obfuscatory associations of “noise” with a more expansive and democratizing understanding of it. Moure tells me, “I am one of those whose research in poetry suggests ignoring the signals (the imposed version of any communication trajectory) and lending an ear to the noise, which is really a signal or signals that are not desired.” Maguire offers a concrete example of the importance of transcribing this noise, suggesting, “noise is defined as … that which is unwanted, and so the condition of being unwanted is one very familiar to queer subjects, for instance,” as it is to other marginalized communities. Maguire articulates Moure’s oeuvre as a critical distancing from dominant culture, and, through poetry, a political awareness of society’s undertows that not only diversifies and voices, but also nurtures the inherent vibrancy that is humanity.

By default, reading any good compilation of poetry is an agreement to follow a curated tour through the eyes of the editor. In this case, Maguire – who is herself an accomplished poet – is an excellent guide, not only leading the way and pointing out the landmarks, but also supporting the reader in the process of making her own inferences. Planetary Noise is structured chronologically, in seven sections, which map thematic recurrences and propulsions through language and translation, feminism and queer sexuality, identity and citizenship, and poetry as a philosophical mode of thought. Indeed, it has been one of the utmost pleasures, reading through this selection of Moure’s oeuvre, to detect a continuity of thinking, preoccupations that progress from gentler, younger iterations, to more rigorous insistences on similar concerns, articulated with the confidence of a career to back them up.

According to Maguire, the editing process was collaborative, but Moure gives Maguire all the credit. “It was Shannon who reread all the books and came up with the arc and the selections,” she explains. “I lack the distance to see the work as a whole, and I found her insights brought new light to bear on the poems and work, and created a new book out of … books!” In fact, Maguire has created more than a new book: she has assembled an essential reference that could serve not only as an introductory overview to Moure’s poetry, but also as a scholarly base for a more critical engagement with her work. Maguire’s opening essay is biographically informative, analytically whip-smart, and elicits a real curiosity in the reader to return to the poems and to delve deeper. The appended bibliography of further reading sets a critical tone, appealing to future research.

While Moure’s erudite, and, at times, keenly philosophical writing welcomes scholarly engagement, her manipulation of language can also be very playful. Despite its complexity, her poetry is never elevated to an immaculate genre beyond reach. Rather, language is approached with tactility, as a malleable substance that can unravel itself to reveal unexpected depths of interpretation, then veer off for a humorous jaunt. Words realign themselves. “The whoel” splinters, suggesting to “Huse some images” instead. Evocative neologisms force the reader to actively consider the intention behind unfamiliar organizations of language. “Solidaily,” for example, could evoke quotidian solitude, solidarity, soldierly mundanity, and more. Similarly, “a-diction” foregrounds dependence on language, the script of living within a context of verbal communication, and the gap, that missing “d,” which complicates exegesis, but also registers as illumination, a quick skip in the tread of reading. “(how can we exceed this with werdtsz),” Moure poses parenthetically, mischievously. While the referent of “this” remains uncertain, it is indisputable that “words” have been dismantled to an onomatopoeic wheeze, and that Words, in a grander, more abstract sense, have been mined, so that the rock-hard quartz of “werdtsz” breaks apart, and light seeps in through the cracks.

Once the act of writing in English has been destabilized, Moure – who also works in French and Galician, Spanish, and Portuguese – is able to push a step further to braid strands of different languages together, to “conduct a leakage out of ordinary language, out of the monolingualism in one’s own language.” One strategy Moure occasionally applies is to repeatedly switch codes between French and English, fluctuating back and forth from line to line. This approach shapes a structural ease of multilingualism, while keeping the reader alert as the tongue slips tardily between different expectations of pronunciation. Although Planetary Noise prioritizes Moure’s original poetry over her translations, her incisive contribution to the latter domain is acknowledged in the final section of the book – Moure welcomes local writers such as Montreal’s Oana Avasilichioaei and Nicole Brossard, as well as international figures such as Fernando Pessoa, Chus Pato, and Wilson Bueno, among others, onto her pages. As multiple languages begin to cling together and merge, and every poem constructs its individual set of vocabularies, one might conclude, along with Moure: “At this point I ceased to understand any language.”

As a Montreal resident for over three decades, Moure embraces the Babylonian in life as in literature. “I speak and write French, Galician, and English here every day. I hear Arabic and Mandarin, Italian, Russian, Polish, Romanian every day in the streets, and others,” she tells me. Montreal unfurls itself to geographically embody
the linguistic hospitality, the interconnective, resonating sound wave of Moure’s poetry: “Montreal is a place where fear of languages, and of the unknown of language and thought is nearly absent. I find it warm and amazing to live and think among others who also live and think with curiosity.” mRb

]]>http://mtlreviewofbooks.ca/reviews/planetary-noise/feed/011535Road Through Timehttp://mtlreviewofbooks.ca/reviews/road-through-time/
http://mtlreviewofbooks.ca/reviews/road-through-time/#respondFri, 07 Jul 2017 04:19:55 +0000http://mtlreviewofbooks.ca/v4/?post_type=mrb_review&p=11539Mary Soderstrom might just be my new favourite writer. She’s been writing for years, and we’ve been reading her for years, but meeting her reveals an energy that is contagious, and a humility that should be. Soderstrom in person is as unassuming, open, and delightful as she is erudite and elegant on the page.

Perhaps there is a kind of quiet that comes from looking back on a life well written – even as the writing continues, fuller steam ahead than ever. Soderstrom is so focused on where she is going that she seems happy to blur the details of where she has been. “Is that in the book?” she asks as she relates an anecdote that might have been pertinent. “Did I put that in the book?” The book in question, her fifteenth, has been on shelves a little over a month, and already the author has moved on. Already, in fact, she is two books down the road.

This juncture could lead to a smooth segue about the figurative weight of Road Through Time: The Story of Humanity on the Move, but Soderstrom’s latest non-fiction offering contains very little of the author. Personal road trip stories from Soderstrom’s youth and from more recent travels are used as bookends, providing a sense of awe, but Road Through Time, while steeped in her fascinations, is no confessional journey. “I don’t like having lots of stuff written in the first person,” she says. “I think that’s egoistic, and I get annoyed.” Soderstrom has a strong literary voice – the prose is cut through with the ebb and flow of her trademark loveliness, as she gestures at, for instance, “the eons-long waltz of continents over the earth’s surface” – but she is not her own character in these pages.

Road Through TimeThe Story of Humanity on the MoveMary Soderstrom

University of Regina Press$26.95paper256pp9780889774773

In a book that traces hominid paths to 3.6 million years ago, the predominance of a lone twenty-first-century voice might seem egoistic indeed. While Road Through Time is ostensibly about the paths humans have carved out, followed, and imposed, the temporal is a featured player: what narrative tension is etched in this exhaustively researched book tussles between the unabating forward movement of humanity marking time as it imprints on the landscape and the equally relentless reminders that our presence here is ephemeral, our time finite. “We’re here,” Soderstrom says. “But the world has been around for such a long time. Obviously at some point we’re going to disappear.”

Time accordions in and out in the book, from incomprehensibly deep time to more accelerated, compact contemporary movement. Soderstrom relates the history of roads from humans’ exit from Africa across the Red Sea, examines the shift away from nomadism, and looks at trade, marine, and martial routes. Our ancestors’ exploitative instincts are followed to modern times, with chapters on urbanization and industrialization, the ascendancy of the automobile, and international perspectives. Every chapter is thick with irresistible detail, from the history of Roman aqueducts in Portugal to land-division protocols in nineteenth-century America. The meticulous endnotes marry facts and source information with the sort of inherent poetry that so captivates writers (referencing an International Space Station video of the Red Sea, Soderstrom notes that “the clouds at the end obscure the opening of the sea at Bab al-Mandab, called the Gate of Grief because of its tricky, strong currents”).

Throughout, Soderstrom draws attention to the impact of the human presence, what she refers to in the book as “dirt packed down by people.” “The basic thing,” she tells me, “is that we – anatomically modern humans – took over the world.” With Homo sapiens comes, inevitably, destruction – climate change, water crises caused by deforestation. Soderstrom’s environmentalism is matter-of-fact: the road, she says, will take us to the end of days, yet we walk on. “If you think that there’s really no hope at all, then you’re paralyzed.”

One glimpse of hope among the shadows is the resilience of women. Discussing the migrations of early humans across the planet, Soderstrom writes, “bring your women and the stage is set for permanent, game-changing settlement.” Settlers lived longer and got healthier, resulting in “more help for young families from grandmothers and older aunts.” The so-called Grandmother Effect also allowed women of child-bearing age to have more babies closer together, increasing the collective survival rate. “One keeps having children,” Soderstrom says now, even in an uncertain age, which is itself “an act of hope.” Feminism seeps into Road Through Time in more subtle ways as well – a discussion of the genetic path of the “Eves” from whom all modern humans are descended, or a recollection of Soderstrom’s mother’s vigil over her young daughters as their Greyhound plowed through the northern-California night.

In a feminist light, too, Soderstrom is generous, sympathizing with young parents’ creative dry spells. “When my kids were small,” she says, “I didn’t do very much writing. I tell people that actually I’m ten years younger than I really am! Between my first novel in 1976 and the second one, there’s almost twenty years.” Even in those seemingly unproductive years, however, she says, “you’re absorbing all kinds of ideas and experiences.” Material for perpetual storage and possible use, along with heaps of clippings and notes.

She still goes back, for instance, to notes from a 2001 trip to Africa when she was writing the novel Violets of Usambara. There has always been a great deal of cross-pollination in Soderstrom’s work, with characters or even entire scenes sneaking from one book into another. “It seems synergistic to me,” she says, unconcerned; “things are interwoven.”

Now far from her fallow moments, Soderstrom always has both fiction and non-fiction projects on the go. Her next book, due out next year, is a geopolitical comparison that twins various states. And she is currently in the early stages of research about concrete, an outgrowth of the urban preoccupations that arose in writing Road Through Time. She is gleeful about her preliminary findings – the existence of a brotherhood of engineers founded in the wake of bridge-building tragedies, Bauhaus design influences, a long-forgotten scene in Faulkner. “Actually, concrete is terrific!”

That thematic seeding between books creates a sense of continuity, and speaks to a learned and curious mind. “For a long time, my default password was ‘curious,’” Soderstrom confides – unsurprisingly, given her tirelessness, and the breadth of her involvement and career. What will she do when she retires, I ask, as if writers ever retire. “Play the piano!” she laughs, before tossing off the most succinct description of writerly activity I’ve ever heard: “I’ve always said that I work never and always.”

“The roads we build determine our future,” Soderstrom reminds us in Road Through Time. As for what that future will look like for humanity… “I’d hoped to have a more definite end to the book, that I could tell people what they ought to do, but I don’t know what they ought to do. It’s just bearing witness to some extent. We don’t know where we’re going. It’s impossible to think of us going on forever. The question is how do we go out.” And what we leave behind. In Soderstrom’s case, that legacy is well lined, and still pushing forward. mRb

]]>http://mtlreviewofbooks.ca/reviews/road-through-time/feed/011539Waking Godshttp://mtlreviewofbooks.ca/reviews/waking-gods/
http://mtlreviewofbooks.ca/reviews/waking-gods/#respondFri, 07 Jul 2017 04:18:49 +0000http://mtlreviewofbooks.ca/v4/?post_type=mrb_review&p=11547“I‘m building the inside of a spaceship in our laundry room,” Sylvain Neuvel tells me as our conversation in a Pointe-Saint-Charles café is winding down. This fantastical statement serves as the perfect capstone to our discussion about the unexpected turns his life has taken since he wrote his debut novel Sleeping Giants (2016). Bursting with political intrigue, high-stakes action, and fully fleshed-out characters, it was the first volume in his smart and highly addictive series of science fiction thrillers, The Themis Files. Waking Gods, the second book in the series, was published by New York sci-fi powerhouse Del Rey this spring.

Sitting across from me for over an hour, Neuvel was an engaging subject. His enthusiasm in talking about his fictional world, and those of other authors, was infectious, especially when discussing the extensive research he conducted before writing each book. “Everything in there is pretty rock solid,” he tells me. “I put more research into Sleeping Giants than my PhD, probably by a power of ten.”

Waking GodsSylvain Neuvel

Del Rey$37.00cloth336pp9781101886724

Neuvel, who trained as a linguist at the University of Chicago, had to learn about minerals, American military hierarchy, and the international locales where the book takes place, among other subjects, to give the story its authentic feel. For Waking Gods he went even further afield, reading British Parliamentary debates and investigating the genetic code, which plays a major part in the book’s crucial plot twist. “The only made-up thing is the giant robot,” he says with a laugh. “Giant robots are not realistic. They’re pretty much the least practical thing you can come up with.”

The world depicted in The Themis Files is our own present day, except for the recent discovery of a massive robot abandoned on Earth by an ancient alien civilization that buried it in separate pieces all over the globe. Sleeping Giants gives a page-turning account of the top-secret search for the dismembered parts. Once the robot is assembled and named Themis, the challenge becomes keeping it secret. A major international incident is narrowly averted when Themis’s existence is accidentally revealed to the world at large.

“It started with my son,” Neuvel says, explaining the origin of his series. “I built him a toy robot and he started asking a ton of questions. ‘What does it do? Can it fly? Does it have missiles? Lasers? Pilots?’ So for a while I had this idea simmering as a backstory for a toy. One night we were watching Goldorak [Grendizer in English, a vintage Japanese giant robot TV series] and he was way into it. And I thought, ‘What if we found one of those? What if we found big giant robots from outer space, from another civilization?’” The answers to these questions make for enthralling reading, made even more compelling by the unique format in which they’re told. The novel is made up of “files,” mostly transcripts of interviews conducted by the Themis program’s unnamed shadowy founder. An insider in the American military community, this mystery man interviews the small team – scientists, pilots, and even a linguist – he assembles to work on the top-secret project. Through these interviews, as well as personal diary entries, mission logs, and other forms of documentation, readers are granted a front-row seat to the solving of one of the great mysteries of our time.

The rich cast of characters who come to life in the series include Dr. Rose Franklin, a top scientist tasked with studying all aspects of Themis, and Kara Resnick, an ace pilot who turns her aviation skills to learning how to drive the alien vehicle. Another crucial member of the team is Vincent Couture, a brilliant Montreal-based linguist (Neuvel insists he is not autobiographical) who studies the mysterious runes inside the robot’s cockpit, but whose role soon becomes far more central to the project.

Readers learn about Themis as the team explores its capabilities and speak about it in frank, everyday language. Their discussions about the philosophical implications of using alien technology are peppered with black humour, written in an inherently readable, irreverent style. Think Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets the giant robots of Pacific Rim.

Taking place nine years after the events of Sleeping Giants, Waking Gods flips everything we learned in the first volume on its head. When an alien robot related to Themis arrives in downtown London, followed by a dozen others who take up residence in the most populous cities in the world, it’s no spoiler to say that the results are a little bit destructive. When I ask Neuvel if he enjoyed destroying large swathes of certain global capital cities, he replies with a mischievous grin: “It was so fun.”

“Every excuse I’ve had to be remotely mature is now gone from my life.”

In Waking Gods, Themis’s team find themselves in a white-knuckled race to save humanity from being entirely wiped out. The novel has major consequences for Neuvel’s fictional world. Two central characters perish during a deadly alien gas attack on New York City, and, like Sleeping Giants, Waking Gods ends on a major cliffhanger that will have readers salivating for the next instalment.

Currently writing the third volume in the series, Neuvel still sounds awed by the extraordinary chain of events that led to his first book being bought at auction by one of the world’s most prestigious science fiction publishers. “I’ve written all my life but mostly for newspapers. I had no idea about the book business, but I read about it on the internet,” he tells me. “I queried fifty-six agents. Most never replied, which is apparently normal. So I figured what the hell, I’ll self-publish it.”

Hoping for a review that he could use as a blurb on the cover of the book, Neuvel sent an advance copy of Sleeping Giants to American publishing trade magazine Kirkus Reviews. He was surprised to receive a glowing review, and was immediately inundated with calls from Hollywood agents looking to buy the film rights. He eventually optioned the book to Sony Pictures and the screenplay is currently being written by Jurassic Park scriptwriter David Koepp. All this happened before he even had a literary agent, and well before the book was snapped up by Del Rey at auction.

“Most of this happened in one wild month in 2014,” he says, still not quite believing his luck. Since then, Sleeping Giants and Waking Gods have been published to critical acclaim, nominated for awards, and translated into over twenty-two languages. When each foreign edition is published, Neuvel celebrates by adding a bottle of whiskey distilled in that country to his liquor cabinet.

The success of The Themis Files has also led to invitations to work on other science fiction properties, most notably “TK- 146275,” a short story published in Star Wars Insider magazine, and set within the mythological “canon” of the multi-billion- dollar Star Wars universe. And beyond that, there’s something new on the horizon, a project set in a very cool existing sci-fi property. In our interview Neuvel was adamant that he couldn’t talk about it publicly yet, despite clearly being thrilled about the prospect of playing around in another science-fiction world.

As our interview wraps up, Neuvel returns to the subject of his toys, the original inspiration for the books that have completely changed his life. Showing me photos of some of his favourites on his phone, he also tells me about the aforementioned spaceship in the laundry room. “One entire wall will be display cabinets for my toys. Every excuse I’ve had to be remotely mature is now gone from my life,” he says, looking up from his phone with an excited laugh. Neuvel’s deep love for science fiction is now on grand display in his basement – and it is also apparent on every page of Sleeping Giants and Waking Gods. mRb